Anarchist Social Struggles in Greece- open public dialogue with anarchist members from Void Network from Athens Friday 25/1/2019–Cowley Club | Brighton Greece became a world news report center during the revolt of December 2008 after the assassination of 15 years old boy Alexis Grigoropoulos, by the Greek police in Exarchia square, the stronghold of anarchists and leftists in Athens for the last 40 years. The global economic crises brought Greece again in global news… …

Almost two months after their emergence the yellow vests are still here! The movement started attracting international attention and more extensive coverage after the events that took place on Saturday 1/12. This was expectable, since no matter what our political judgment may turn out to be, we are faced with a nationwide revolt, which has not simply prompted thoughts for a state of emergency, but led to its informal implementation,… …

In this in-depth analysis, Peter Gelderloos explores the technological and geopolitical changes that movements for liberation will face over the next several decades. How will those who hold power today attempt to weather the economic and political crises ahead? Will artificial intelligence and bioeconomics save capitalism? What’s more dangerous—governments refusing to address climate change, or the technocratic solutions they will propose? Will we see the rise of fascism, or the… …

What’s all this about? The Hambach Forest, which one could call the last “primeval” forest in Central Europe, is being stubbed for Europe’s biggest climate pollutant – the Rhenish lignite mining area of RWE (Rheinisches Braunkohlerevier), in which RWE mines brown coal. Whole villages and the health of human beings are destroyed in this process. To prevent all of this we squatted the Hambacher Forest and take part in other… …

Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers. It was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a talk — about half my annual professor’s salary — all to deliver some insight on the subject of “the future of technology.” I’ve never liked talking about the future. The Q&A sessions always… …

During the last 10 years, a lot of comrades in different countries have participated in the struggle around the question of migration, whether it be about the struggle of paperless people to get regularized, the struggle around housing in poor neighbourhoods, the struggle against raids on the street and on the public transport or the struggle against the detention centres. Often these have led to a repetition of certain impasses… …

From Occupy to Ferguson, whenever a new grassroots movement arises, pundits charge that it lacks clear demands. Why won’t protesters summarize their goals as a coherent program? Why aren’t there representatives who can negotiate with the authorities to advance a concrete agenda through institutional channels? Why can’t these movements express themselves in familiar language, with proper etiquette? Often, this is simply disingenuous rhetoric from those who prefer for movements to limit… …

A new study finds an alarming rise in a novel form of psychological distress. Call it “neoliberal perfectionism.” A new study by Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill in the journal Psychological Bulletin finds perfectionism is on the rise. The authors, both psychologists, conclude that “recent generations of young people perceive that others are more demanding of them, are more demanding of others, and are more demanding of themselves.” When identifying the root cause of… …

For two thousand years, the peoples residing in Zomia — the mountainous region that stretches from the Central Highlands of Vietnam to northeastern India — have fled the organized state societies in the valleys. Far from being ‘remnants’ left behind by civilizing societies, they are “barbarians by choice”, peoples who have deliberately put distance between themselves and lowland, state-centers. James Scott, director of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale… …

By BEN VICKERS and HANS-ULRICH OBRIST Ain’t no party like a decentralised party In one sense, the rave scene has always been encrypted. In its heyday, when news of illicit parties spread by word of mouth, you just needed to know the right people. But new technologies are adding another layer to this. Throughout the last year, rumours of a crypto-enabled rave revival have been rife on the dark net and in closely… …

After the initial wave of terror and fury, my post-election tactic has mostly been dissociation. Out of safety, out of self-protection. I know that ignoring these truths won’t save me- that I need to engage, to stand in solidarity with the homies- with the scientists- with the immigrants and children of immigrants- with the Muslims- with the Mexicans- with the queers- with the artists.. but something about the way the… …

-1- Fascism in the 21st century has direct continuity to the insurgent movements that tore apart Europe, culminating in the Second World War. The methods, tactics, and strategies have changed, but the potential of the genocidal-racialist machine remains, and the ideologies are linked through history. -2- Fascism does not necessitate a specific type of statecraft (or a state at all), nor does it require a particular party apparatus, a fixed demographic… …

For all its small size and general impoverishment the libertarian socialist movement actually runs a surprisingly large amount of real estate around Britain, all on non-hierarchical lines, by and for the people of the cities and towns we’re in. Housing co-ops, bookshops, bike collectives, archives, distros, printers and the like are all part of the collective mix. Below, Freedom News briefly rounds up some goings-on at 15 radical social centres… …

What if it’s not us who are sick, asks Rod Tweedy, but a system at odds with who we are as social beings? Mental illness is now recognised as one of the biggest causes of individual distress and misery in our societies and cities, comparable to poverty and unemployment. One in four adults in the UK today has been diagnosed with a mental illness, and four million people take antidepressants every year.… …

What you are about to read is a real life horror story. It is a tale of tear gas, bloodshed, and fascists burning a black man alive; it is a tale of overwhelming imperial aggression against a people who pose no threat to their invaders, a calculated strike of pure barbarism that would give Attila the Hun pause and Andrew Jackson the willies. It is the story of Venezuela, America’s newest… …

I will start from the knot between two of the concepts that are proposed to the reflection of our panel: equality and emancipation. I will briefly recall the two main points that are implied for me in the idea of emancipation. The first one is that equality is not a goal to be reached. It is not a common level, an equivalent amount of riches or an identity of living… …

It’s not every day that one of the world’s largest publishing companies is awarded $15 million in damages for copyright infringement against a site set up by a Kazakh neuroscientist. That makes the almost total lack of wider coverage of Elsevier’s win in New York against Sci-Hub surprising. But it is only the latest development in a saga that is of great interest for the deep flaws it exposes in both scientific publishing and… …

Anarchists are against nationalism; everyone knows that. Instead of solidarity across borders and anti-hierarchical antagonism within them, nationalism engenders loyalty to the state with its armed forces and public symbols, encourages the oppressed to identify with their compatriot oppressors, scapegoats minorities, and pits workers of different countries against one another in economic competition or open warfare. Opposition to nationalism is an almost trivial starting point for anarchist politics, reflected in… …

Text: Ελληνικά / English. It may seem paradoxical, but Greece ’s anarchists are organizing like never before. Seven years of austerity policies and a more recent refugee crisis have left the government with fewer and fewer resources, offering citizens less and less. Many have lost faith. Some who never had faith in the first place are taking matters into their own hands, to the chagrin of the authorities. Tasos Sagris,… …

Climate change, a crippled welfare state, the financial crisis, skyrocketing income inequality, political disappointments reaching back decades, terrible superhero movies grossing billions of dollars, Facebook and Tinder—these are just a few of the sins attributed to neoliberalism. But what exactly is neoliberalism? An economic doctrine? The revenge of capitalism’s ruling class? Or something even more insidious? Booked is a monthly series of Q&As with authors by Dissent contributing editor Timothy Shenk. For this… …

No, these are not photos from battlegrounds in Ukraine or Syria—these are from Paris, the erstwhile city of love and light, transformed into another stage for conflict in the aftermath of two years of terror attacks and heightened security and anxiety. photo 1: Nous Somme le Peule Qui Manque [We Are the Missing People]. Rue de Chaligny. Paris, May 26, 2016. Nearly three months after the first gatherings, the demonstrations became… …

The visit of the outgoing US President Barack Obama to Greece is anything but ceremonial. Apart from the strong symbolic weight of the visit of an American president on the eve of the Athens Polytechnic uprising anniversary (and, what is more, under a self-proclaimed “left-wing” government), the content of Obama’s visit could be actually summed up in the phrase “business as usual”; a type of business, however, that, as we… …

Language: English / Ελληνικά The basic income — paid to all, and for life — is now a fashionable idea across Europe. But would it supplement welfare or replace it? Olli Kangas, a director at Finland’s social insurance body, Kela (1), says: ‘To talk about a basic income without being specific is like talking about getting a kitten without saying whether you mean a cat or a tiger.’ Over the last… …

The alternatives to neoliberalism – including a new community type of agriculture and community-owned green energy, local currencies, peer-to-peer networks and a sharing economy – are already here and unfolding right now. All we need is a revolution writes NICK MEYNEN TTIP, bargain sales of crown jewels of states, Panama-Paper-scale tax evasions, fast-tracks for dirty mining companies in Greece, expulsions to make place for Special Economic Zones and new zones… …

We tend to perceive our identities as stable and largely separate from outside forces. But over decades of research and therapeutic practice, I have become convinced that economic change is having a profound effect not only on our values but also on our personalities. Thirty years of neoliberalism, free-market forces and privatisation have taken their toll, as relentless pressure to achieve has become normative. If you’re reading this sceptically, I… …

There is a clear case to be made for the connection between ecology and anarchism.1 Many philosophers, academics, and radicals have elaborated this over the past two centuries2. But reviewing the history of this theoretical relationship is not the goal here. The movement surrounding anarchism in the past 200 years has certainly included its fair share of theory, yet what has rooted anarchist ideas so deeply in human society is… …

Since the civil rights movement, white people have exploited every opportunity to conceal their colonialist legacy and longstanding (ab)use of white supremacist power. They’ve proven time and again that they have no interest in rectifying that history, only in dealing with the fact that they could no longer deny the reality of those injustices. One effective tactic has been to separate white supremacy and colonialism from the way racism is… …

photos from Afghanistan in 70s, before CIA promoting Islam fundamentalists A hundred years ago, it would have been unimaginable to have a pair of Muslim men enter a cafe or a public transportation vehicle, and then blow themselves up, killing dozens. Or to massacre the staff of a satirical magazine in Paris! Things like that were simply not done. When you read the memoirs of Edward Said, or talk… …

The current economic crisis may be another bump on capitalism’s always dizzying terrain, or it may signal epochal changes. The crisis of the financial markets has taken on gargantuan proportions. This spring saw the emergency sale of Bear Stearns, the fifth largest financial institution on Wall Street, to JP Morgan for a paltry sum by “Master of the Universe” standards, including its flashy corporate headquarters and thousands of employees.… …

“You can use the 600 Euros that you will find on me to pay our health insurance. I paid the rent yesterday. I am sorry, my daughter, I could not take more suffering just to put a warm plate on the table – a bloody plate. Make sure that our daughter goes to college and never leave her alone. She should get the house that we have in the village.”… …

Two years ago in Seattle, on May 1st, 2012, roughly four to five hundred people engaged in the largest riot the city had seen in more than a decade. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of property were destroyed[i], a minor state of emergency was declared, and the next day’s headlines were filled with horror stories of crazy, “out-of-town” anarchists run amok. This event, occurring on the tail end of the… …

Dear comrade, for sure there are a lot of projects In this article that Void Network disagree with them or we could critisize them as naive, non antagonistic, alternative or passive. But we have to agree that there is a lot of inspiration, a lot of creative effort, a lot of fantasy and many many good intentions in all these projects that this article includes. It is the work of… …

With the emergence of a privileged mediocrity, the innocent life became accessible to the masses. No longer was joe average part of a class striving to historical ends, e.g. revolution or fascism; enter a cold era, now devoid of passion. While outside, storms raged and changerapidly followed change, one’s own life was left to grind to a halt.Time, regardless of history, fashion, politics, sex and the media, was to take… …

“To analyze the psychology of political violence is not only extremely difficult, but also very dangerous. If such acts are treated with understanding, one is immediately accused of eulogizing them. If, on the other hand, human sympathy is expressed with the Attentäter, one risks being considered a possible accomplice. Yet it is only intelligence and sympathy that can bring us closer to the source of human suffering, and teach us… …

In his early writings, Marx described the German situation as one in which the only answer to particular problems was the universal solution: global revolution. This is a succinct expression of the difference between a reformist and a revolutionary period: in a reformist period, global revolution remains a dream which, if it does anything, merely lends weight to attempts to change things locally; in a revolutionary period, it becomes clear… …

ALL MUST WORK! declares the cabinet of millionaires. ‘Workers not shirkers!’, they implore. ‘Strivers not skivers!’ The divide-and-rule rhetoric trying to pit those in work against those without is as relentless as it is transparent. But what’s so good about work anyway? Junge Linke’s short piece nicely skewers how attempts to mobilise resentment of claimants and the unemployed undermine even those in work who aren’t claiming benefits. What I’d like to focus… …

“To deny society, one must attack its language.” – Guy Debord. The impossible is a closed universe. Nevertheless, we possess the key to it and, as we’ve suspected for millennia, its door opens on a field of infinite possibilities. More than ever, this field belongs to us, to explore and cultivate. The key is neither magic nor symbolic. The ancient Greeks called it “poetry,” from the verb poiein, to construct,… …

In the first of a two part correspondence, John Holloway and Michael Hardt discuss some common themes that have emerged from their most recent books “Crack Capitalism” and “CommonWealth” and touch of the topics of organisation, democracy and institutionalism. The second part of the exchange will be published in Issue 15 of Shift magazine. July 2010 Dear John,One of the things I love about ‘Crack Capitalism’, which it shares with… …

Madrid On The Brink: S25 → S29 from brandon jourdan on Vimeo. Void Network presents the short film report from Madrid : “Madrid On The Brink: S25 → S29″ by Brandon Jourdan This short film chronicles the events of September 25-29th in Madrid, Spain where tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets to demand the resignation of the government and an end to police brutality. Many of the protests ended in clashes with the police.Since the… …

Thousands marched yesterday in Spain near the parliament building, demanding the resignation of Mariano Rajoy’s government as well as the rewrite of constitution. The police have fired rubber bullets and baton-charged protesters. Spanish media reported that at least 32 people were detained and more than a dozen injured. The protesters dispersed after MPs left the building. A demonstrator, Montse Puigdavall spoke at BBC: I’m here because of all the social… …